Blowing dust - Lossiemouth

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CharlieOneSix
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Blowing dust - Lossiemouth

#1 Post by CharlieOneSix » Sat Apr 18, 2020 3:29 pm

Unusual to get this kind of report in the UK - just shows how little rain we've had up north during the last month....
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Re: Blowing dust - Lossiemouth

#2 Post by Boac » Sat Apr 18, 2020 6:19 pm

Never seen that in the UK. Have seen BLSA a few times.

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Re: Blowing dust - Lossiemouth

#3 Post by izod tester » Sat Apr 18, 2020 6:45 pm

Used to get soil from fields blown acoss the roads in Lincolshire in the late 1960s when the farmers started to dig up their hedges. The soil drifts were several inches deep in places.

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Re: Blowing dust - Lossiemouth

#4 Post by Rossian » Sun Apr 19, 2020 1:36 pm

It has been a feature of the area around Kinloss (not far from Lossie for those not familiar with this area) since I first came here in 1963. The soil is very sandy and as it is cultivated in spring with strong westerly winds in March it stays very dry and is blown off the fields and is sometimes deep enough to block the single track roads. Sometimes it has necessitated a second planting of some grain crops.

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Re: Blowing dust - Lossiemouth

#5 Post by Undried Plum » Sun Apr 19, 2020 4:17 pm

The subsidised ecovandalism of grubbing out hedges in the 60s/70s/80s was a monstrous crime against Nature.

Many people who don't understand or respect Nature think that hedges are mere boundary markers, an anachronism. In fact they are so much more than than. Hedges are wrongly thought of as things which keep fields apart. In fact they hold fields together.

They are oases of immensely prolific and varied life in sterile deserts of monoculture.

The mini-dustbowls you are seeing in dry weather such as this are a direct result of that stupidity, a bit little like a miniature equivalent of the American greed of the early 20th century which raped a vast and vastly species-diverse landscape and displaced it with sterile monocultures to satisfy the greed of banksters like JP Morgan et al. The resultant dustbowl, albeit vastly greater in magnitude, was caused by exactly the same process of greedy stupidity.

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Re: Blowing dust - Lossiemouth

#6 Post by ian16th » Sun Apr 19, 2020 7:25 pm

Were not parts of today's Sahara Desert the breadbasket of the Roman Empire?
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Re: Blowing dust - Lossiemouth

#7 Post by Undried Plum » Sun Apr 19, 2020 8:36 pm

Yes, but that was right at the end of the fertile period in the Maghreb.

The 'old' Gyppos knew how to manage the land. As happens, the Empire days came to an end and there was a collapse of land management, as well as some global climate change.

The Roman era of Imperial domination just happened to come at the end of the viability of farming that ground back then.

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Re: Blowing dust - Lossiemouth

#8 Post by FD2 » Mon Apr 20, 2020 10:10 pm

A lot of the very flat area of the Canterbury Plains in New Zealand used to be marsh and swamp. Early European settlers drained the area for farming and created a system of water races and streams to continue with the drainage. Rarely, after very heavy rainfall there is flooding, sometimes in Christchurch itself where the earthquakes altered some of the land levels so the old drainage system didn't work as it had before.

There is a strong, occasional gale force Foehn wind - the 'Nor-Wester' that is a westerly wind descending on the east side of the Southern Alps after shedding its moisture and which, being extremely dry, saps the moisture from the soil and lifts it in great clouds on a bad day, driving the farmers and their wives mad with frustration as their soil ends up miles away or the washing likewise if it's not simply covered in dust and the houses full of it. Many wind break trees have been planted over the years, which help to some extent, but grass and lots of watering are about the only thing to help.

The soil is very fine, having been deposited over millions of years by the big braided rivers and like the great dust storms on the Prairies was a problem no one could foresee back in Victorian times.

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Re: Blowing dust - Lossiemouth

#9 Post by G-CPTN » Mon Apr 20, 2020 10:30 pm

The first year that we were in Denmark (1981) - we arrived in January - it was a harsh winter - the sea froze (the Baltic is shallow and low saline).
The fields were totally bare - no winter crops, and the farming activity seemed to be constant rollering until the soil was extremely finely crushed.
Of course, once the (slightly) warmer weather arrived, the winds blew the tilth off the fields (which seemed counter-productive), however the plants appeared in early May and by late June were as advanced as those in England.

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Re: Blowing dust - Lossiemouth

#10 Post by barkingmad » Tue May 05, 2020 11:31 am

Posts 4 & 5 by Rossian and Plum have got it exactly.
During my time at Stalag Luft 8 this happened during a couple of Spring and Summer seasons.
The dust clouds were so dense and extensive that cars were banging into each other due to the reduced vis, standard fog driving SOPs being in operation and when the dust had literally settled Morayshire council had to awaken their snow ploughs from their summer hibernation to clear the roads of the dust heaps which had made the highway impassable. Aaaah, halcyon days!
Yet I also saw snow blowing across the airfield on 30th June one year.

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